Is it a good time to upgrade, bitches?!

[Dr. kitteny berk]

oh, ebuyer and overclockers are my stores of choice.

scan is possibly okay, but I fell out with them years ago.

[Mr. Johnson]

Thanks Berk! But it looks like I'll have to stick with those Dutch guys because the euro is worth about the same as toilet paper, still.

[Dr. kitteny berk]

To be fair, really nice bog roll is probably worth more than the euro.

[Mr. Johnson]

A you can see in the other tech thread it's more than likely my graphics card is hella dead. I was going to wait till after New year to buy a new one but looks like it'll be a Christmas gift for myself instead. FJ recommended the 960 GTX, but after hearing Grimmie and Shada guffaw about the 970 I'm contemplating getting that one. Is the difference worth the price?

[Mr. Johnson]

People seem to be pretty excited about this one:

http://uk.hardware.info/productinfo/253 ... rix-oc-4gb

Yes? no? Am I getting ripped off?

[Dr. kitteny berk]

I'd probably do that, or a 950/960/280 for a slightly tighter budget. I don't really think you can go far wrong these days,

[fabyak]

I'm due to fit my GTX950 at Christmas so if you can wait that long (and I won't blame you if you can't) I can give a report. It does seem to rank very highly in benchmarking tests though

[Mr. Johnson]

Turns out I can't. The Johnson Christmas dinner will be crackers and American cheese this year.

[FatherJack]

FJ recommended the 960 GTX, but after hearing Grimmie and Shada guffaw about the 970 I'm contemplating getting that one. Is the difference worth the price?

I have the 970 and it's awesome, but it's a hundred pounds more than a 4GB 960, 50% more - well over what you had in mind at that time. I have read some stuff that 4GB 960s are more likely to run out of oomph before they can ever run out of memory, so are a bit of a strange case. The 970 has over 60% more processing streams though, so it's certainly worth the money if you have the budget, but that might be the wrong question to be asking.

That said, the 970 might be overkill - it's aimed at gamers who play at 4k resolution, though even those who don't have 4k monitors can benefit as it can render at 4k and downscale it on-chip for super-smooth edges.

For playing the latest games at up to 1080 on the highest details, a 960 is fine and a 950 is almost its equal.

[Mr. Johnson]

Sounds like I made the right choice. I was initially going for the 960 due to budget but decided to save just a bit longer because of the aforementioned guffawing and therefore had some extra dosh.

[TezzRexx]

I've had the 970 as well for a while (this one) and it's great, everything runs great on it and the scaling is well worth it.

[Pnut]

New graphics card go tiem! I'll probably have around £200-250 to spend. I am also a little worried about my PSU, nothing wrong with it just wondering if higher end graphics card will need a new PSU (currently on 620w I think).

[fabyak]

http://outervision.com/power-supply-calculator
I would expect 620 to be more than enough

[spoodie]

Not very specific, but if you can't stretch to a NVIDIA GTX 970, a GTX 960 is also good.

620W PSU is fine.

[Dr. kitteny berk]

What they said, with the improved efficiency of computer bits, a hefty PSU isn't thaat important, but decent quality is good.

[TezzRexx]

What they said, with the improved efficiency of computer bits, a hefty PSU isn't thaat important, but decent quality is good.

I can vouch for a GTX 970 as well. 1080p every game easy, 2x resolution on everything too makes things super pretty.

[Roman Totale]

Give me broad recommendations of what to look for when getting a new PC. I have no intention of building it myself mind. And if anyone wants the gizzards from my old machine (not the hard drive though, you can get your own cat pictures) let me know. I'll post what they are later (or look in the old thread on specs).

Budget: I don't have children, but I get twitchy about spending large amounts on luxuries.

Edit: I'm not in any rush so if it's worth waiting for something, that's cool

Here is current gubbins (no autocorrect, not gibbons):


Intel Core i7 920 2.66Ghz D0 Stepping overclocked to 4.00Ghz
ATI Radeon 5970 2048MB

[Mr. Johnson]

Building your own PC is actually not that hard, I know fuck all about electronics and assembled all my own PC's. I did get some help at first but it's pretty intuitive. That said, if you have the money for it I don't see why you shouldn't let someone else build it, less chance for error that way.

I'll let the others tell you about other components but I recently joined the GTX 970 club and it's a fantastic little* card, I heartily recommend it. Also I don't think there's a need to replace that i7, I'm still running an i5 and it's just fine.

*it's quite big actually

[Dog Pants]

Banged out a quick sub-£1000 gaming machine on OCUK's custom built service:

https://www.overclockers.co.uk/ocuk-tec ... g,i,l;m4q4

From the default I swapped out the ugly case for a much more subtle and well thought of Corsair Carbide. I love the silent Fractal Design cases (mine's an R4), but they're an extra £40 or so.
MOBO - Asus are the queens of motherboards at the moment, I believe. This one isn't fancy, and since I doubt you'll be overclocking there's no need for it to be.
CPU is an i7 like your old one. Personally I don't put much clout in CPUs - gone are the day where they provided all a system's grunt, so they're not usually a bottleneck. I've got an old i5 and it handles everything fine, it's the GPU which does all the heavy work. You could get an AMD cheaper, but I've never liked AMD processors.
Memory I upgraded to Corsair from some no-name. RAM is RAM as far as I'm concerned, but I think it's worth the quid extra for a known brand.
CPU cooler - fuck knows. There wasn't an option for stock (because the CPU is OEM), so I left that at the default. It blows air.
SSD/HDD - removed, because you have them. By all means add the 250GB Samsung for your OS. Tt's the difference between having electric windows in your car or not - you don't realise how lovely they are until you get them. Similarly add a big platter drive if you want a storage drive. They're cheap enough. Berk can probably advise on whether you want Seagate or WD.
No optical drive, because the internet.
GPU - Today the reasonable price choice is between the AMD RX 480 and the nVidia 970. I have the exact Sapphire RX 480 on that list, and it's a decent enough card performance-wise, but it's £30 more expensive than the MSI GeForce 970 I picked out and mine has that fucking annoying 15-year-old cursor corruption issue that AMD are incapable of fixing. Stick with nVidia, and MSI have always been pretty reliable for me in the past.
PSU I upgraded to a Corsair, because you don't want to fry your pretty new machine with a shitty cheap power supply.
Removed the OS because I assume your dead machine has one. By all means add Win 10 if you want to pay £80 and save the hassle of recovering the code and farting about with installing it. We can talk you through doing that though. Why in god's name anyone would pay the same to soil a new PC with Win 8 is absolutely beyond me.
Gubbinry (monitor, KB, mouse etc) I assume you have.

I couldn't say whether it's a particularly good price for what you get, I'd have to price up the components separately and I can't be arsed, but I usually find Overclockers to be a pretty reasonable price in general and they do know their shit. Plus you get a free bag of Haribo.

[FatherJack]

The GTX 1060 is about to arrive and theoretically should eclipse the 970 at a similar price point. Even though they are reportedly actually cheaper to make they will most likely be marked up in price so that people still buy 970s that the stores have sitting on shelves. Magazines are guessing around £250 which would be a nice buy, I suspect £300 is more likely, and less nice.

Of course 970s and everything else should have dropped in price when the newer cards came out, but since that would benefit the consumer rather than the retailer, this hasn't happened.